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This need economy is the internal other of capital, although it is very much entangled in the logic of the capitalist market.Īpplying Sanyal and Chatterjee’s conceptualization to fisheries, we highlight that while small-scale fisheries have often been marginalized by processes of capitalist transformation, and indeed become entwined in market dynamics, they still constitute a distinct, vibrant sector that can contribute to the economic and social welfare of coastal populations in sustainable ways. In postcolonial democracies, states cannot simply dispossess populations rather, they reconstitute them as part of the need economy and cater to their well-being.
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Precapital is reproduced in the form of the need economy (Sanyal 2007:39). What they argue is that while primitive accumulation creates a wasteland, it does not completely result in capital superseding precapital. Both Sanyal (2007) and Chatterjee (2004, 2008, 2011), in their recent work, drawing on Foucault’s idea of governmentality, try to explain the existence of what they call the “need economy” (informal sector small-scale economies). We characterize small-scale fisheries as a complex, dynamic, and evolving sector focused primarily on subsistence and income-generating activities that employs mostly labor-intensive harvesting, processing, and distribution technologies (FAO 2005). We conceptualize the capitalist transformation of fisheries and the continued presence and nature of small-scale fisheries in two countries, South Africa and India. Broadly speaking, this literature can be divided into two: (1) literature that problematizes to what extent modern industrialized fisheries are capitalist in nature (van Ginkel 2015, Høst 2016), and (2) literature that examines the impact of growing industrialized fishing fleets on “small-scale” fisheries (Stobutzki et al. 2015), socio-cultural disruptions (Kurien 2003, Davis and Ruddle 2012), and ecological devastation (FAO 2005, 2016) that capitalism can produce (Harvey 2004). Keeping these developments in mind, political ecologists have debated the extent that such transformations of the fisheries sector constitute capitalist transformation, given the socioeconomic inequities (Smith 1990, Eide et al. 2011, World Bank 2017) has induced a “blue revolution” in the sector (Bailey 1988). The economic wealth that the oceans increasingly have come to represent (Eide et al. In different parts of the globe at different points in time, state policy has promoted the industrialization of fisheries (Smith 2000, Bavinck 2011) and its incorporation into international markets (Taylor et al. Key words: capitalist transformation fisheries India moral economies South Africa INTRODUCTION By analyzing capitalist transformation of fisheries in two “democratic” countries, South Africa and India, we highlight how small-scale fishers resist increasing marginalization and how governments have afforded a measure of protection to this sector, and confirm the importance of their moral economies to sustainable and equitable fisheries in the future. We engage with this theorization in the context of fisheries and argue that seeing small-scale fisheries only as a product of primitive accumulation and Foucauldian governmentality ignores the moral economies of these fisheries. The state must, in conditions of democracy, address the welfare needs of all those who have been dispossessed in order to govern.
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Drawing on the notion of Foucauldian governmentality, other scholars have argued that the small-scale sector or what they term the “need economy” is a product of primitive accumulation. This analysis does not, however, explain the continued presence of such a vibrant and important small-scale sector in fisheries throughout the world. For the most part, scholars have emphasized how capitalism has led to privatization of the commons, forced small-scale resource users into wage labor, and marginalized the sector. The industrialization of fisheries and the growth of a capitalist sector within fisheries have received considerable scholarly attention.